We live in a culture that doesn’t know how to talk or think about sex work and sex workers. People who exchange sex for money are portrayed variously as victims of human trafficking, rape, racism, colonial violence and child abuse, as proud heroines who explore terrains of agency and autonomy while providing humane services or as the darkly iconic figures in the misogynist porn fantasies that flicker on a billion late night computer screens.

Sometimes they are portrayed as workers in need of labour solidarity and employment standards protections. It is difficult to know how to begin, and how to sort out the contending versions of truth.

Part of the problem, of course, is that far more is written and said about sex trade workers than by them. They have been literally studied to death by academics, bureaucrats and social workers, but their own voices are too often absent from public debates. As women, as young people of all genders, as trans people, as people of colour and sex trade workers, they are often consigned to silence.

Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme, the co-editors of Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry want to end that silence. In the spirit of the classic radical slogan “Nothing about us without us,” their anthology, slated for bookstores in this month, features work authored by nearly 60 self-identified sex workers from Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia.

As Amber Dawn, one of the co-editors, and author of the prize winning earlier works How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir and Where the Words End and my Body Begins, reminds readers, “Every Time a Sex Worker is Written about in an Institutional Form, a Poem Dies.”

Her colleague, Justin Ducharme, a Metis filmmaker, writer, dancer and curator, told the feminist magazine Room: “Honestly I hope readers can see how complex and diverse sex work experience and sex workers are. Stereotypical representation of sex workers in film and media has done an excellent job at making it seem like its one type of person that does Sex Work, like we’re so easily identifiable.”

This is an important book, full of pungent, sometimes triumphant verse and often troubling images. Anyone who wants to participate in the ongoing policy discussions about sex trade work in Canada and anyone who values honest, well crafted writing should own a copy.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net